Work
Kristien Hemmerechts published her debut in 1986 with the collection First Fictions, Introduction 9 which was written in English. Her first novel Een Zuil van Zout was published in 1987. It received the Prijs van de provincie Brabant. In 1990 she received the prestigious Vlaamse driejaarlijkse Staatsprijs voor proza. A recurring theme in Hemmerechts' work is man's incapability to give direction in life. Characters are faced with the incapability of communicating with others which leads to the inability of creating meaningful human relationships. Causes are to be sought in feelings of estrangement from the world and the self, loneliness and guilt.
In a lot of her work, Hemmerechts depicts sexuality from a female point of view. Explicit scenes are the foundation of accusations that say Kristien Hemmerechts deliberately wants to provoke her readers. Her style is a distant one that registers accounts and thought. She shows rather than participates as a narrator in her story lines.
Read more about this topic: Kristien Hemmerechts
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“How dare I read Washington’s campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)